11 February, 2011

This is a really terrific documentary. I’ve embedded Part 1 for you. From there you can find parts 2-14. So, yes, it’s nearly 140 minutes. I didn’t think it was possible for someone to find Star Wars behind the scenes footage I hadn’t seen before. I was wrong. Big time.

Oh — and it’s fan-made. Puts many studio docs to shame. See it before LFL has it taken down or something.

19 January, 2011

When Hitch is good, he is very, very good. This is one of the best defenses of free speech and free thought I’ve ever heard. My religious readers will need to be sitting down with their minds open. Just try to fault his logic here.

I’ll give you one potential oversimplification. I think that most Muslim haters of the Jews would be that way even without the New Testament. I do like the “badly plagiarized” comment.

16 December, 2010

I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed “indifferent.” California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.

The “congress-created dustbowl” is plenty obvious from I-5. Hanson’s report from inside the valley is heartbreaking. If this state isn’t dead, it’s awfully close.

Hanson’s description of modern California would be a fitting updated version of my observations of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. The analogy is not exact, of course, because the political and economic systems, and the root causes, are so different.

But the result is the same. An increasing inability of the economic system to support the agenda of the first world cities and political elites.

It is true that we were cautious in our planning. There were many uncertainties about how well our Lunar module systems and our Pressure suit and backpack would match the engineering predictions in the hostile lunar environment. We were operating in a near perfect vacuum with the temperature well above 200 degrees Fahrenheit with the local gravity only one sixth that of Earth. That combination cannot be duplicated here on Earth, but we tried as best we could to test our equipment for those conditions. For example, because normal air conditioning is inadequate for lunar conditions, we were required to use cold water to cool the interior of our suits. We did not have any data to tell us how long the small water tank in our backpacks would suffice. NASA officials limited our surface working time to 2 and 3/4 hours on that first surface exploration to assure that we would not expire of hyperthermia. After returning to and repressurizing the Lunar Module, we were able to drain and measure the remaining water in the backpacks to confirm the predicted.

6 December, 2010

The take that you have seen is the very last take we did at 8pm on the last day of the shoot. Take 40. The tension as we watched Robert do this take was unbelievable. It was such a good take at every stage and so the longer it went on without any fluffs the greater the pressure grew for nothing to go wrong. When he got to the end and I got to call cut there was this huge roar and applause from the crew and agency and I knew we had it.